Fatal Quest

by Sally Spencer

‘That’s right. An’ then I do have to wait on you hand an’ foot. Not because you want me to – you’re in no state to want anythin’ very much by that stage – but because you’re in such a mess there’s no choice in the matter.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Woodend agreed. ‘The next time I’m feelin’ ill, I promise you I’ll take it easy right from the start. But I’m not ill now.’

  ‘That’s what you always say when you’re startin’ to feel proper poorly,’ Joan sniffed disdainfully.

  On the underground stretch of the journey home, Woodend’s legs began to feel as if they’d had heavy weights attached to them, and by the time the couple reached their flat, his entire body was aching and hot.

  ‘You put the kettle on, an’ I’ll slip down the road an’ pick up Pauline Anne from her mate’s house,’ he told his wife.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing, Charlie,’ Joan said. ‘Just look at yourself! You’re positively sweatin’ buckets.’

  ‘I do feel a bit hot,’ he admitted.

  ‘I’ll go an’ pick up Annie,’ his wife said firmly, ‘an’ you – my lad – will get yourself straight off to bed.’

  It was never wise to argue with Joan when she was in this kind of mood, Woodend knew from past experience, and anyway, truth to tell, he didn’t really feel as if he had the strength to.

  He lumbered heavily into the bedroom, and stripped off his clothes – which should have been a quick enough operation, but somehow wasn’t. That done, he climbed into bed, and immediately fell into an uneasy sleep.

  He is lying down. There is no one else in the bed with him, but he senses that there is someone else in the room.

  He tries to open his eyes, and realizes that his eyelids have been glued to his cheekbones. His raises his hands, and slowly – painfully – peels the eyelids back with his fingers.

  This is when he sees her standing there – a pretty half-caste girl.

  ‘Hello,’ she says with a smile. ‘I’m Pearl Jones.’

  She is wearing a red dress which is rather short, and has a neckline which, while it doesn’t exactly plunge, certainly swoops down far enough to offer promise. This is the dress, he recognizes, that will eventually become her shroud.

  There are so many questions he wants to ask her, but the one that immediately comes out of his mouth is, ‘Does your mother know you’ve got that dress?’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ Pearl asks, pouting and feigning childlike disappointment.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ he says, not wanting to hurt her feelings, but knowing that he is going to have to be honest. ‘Very nice indeed. It’s just that somehow it simply doesn’t belong on a kid like you at all. That’s why I asked if your mother knew about it.’

  Pearl smiles again, slightly mischievously this time. ‘You’ve met her,’ she says. ‘What do you think?’

  Victoria Jones is a God-fearing woman, who goes to church regularly and doesn’t drink, Woodend reminds himself.

  ‘Of course she doesn’t know about it,’ he says.

  ‘Of course she doesn’t,’ Pearl agrees.

  ‘So what were you doin’, wearin’ it on the night that you … on the night that you …?’

  ‘On the night that I died?’ Pearl asks. ‘Because I do know I’m dead. Or rather, you know I’m dead.’

  ‘I’m not followin’ you,’ Woodend confesses.

  ‘I’m not really here,’ Pearl says. ‘I’m in the morgue. And you should have learned by now, Charlie, that even the dead can’t be in two places at once.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Woodend says, almost pitifully.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Pearl agrees. ‘But you’re not at your best, so that’s only to be expected. Let me see if I can help you.’

  She raises one arm in the air, above her head, then brings it down in a sharp arc before straightening it out again. And when it comes to a stop, she punches the air underneath with her free hand.

  ‘What am I doing, Charlie?’ she asks.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Woodend mumbles.

  ‘Come on, Charlie!’ Pearl says, with an anger which he recognizes – even now – as not hers, but his own. ‘You’re a bright feller – a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. And you know all about charades – you had your cousin Ethel’s kids in stitches when you played it with them last Christmas. So what have I just been doing?’

  ‘Mimin’?’

  ‘Yes! But what was I mimin’?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll do it again, but only the once,’ Pearl says sternly.

  She repeats the action, and this time he understands it.

  ‘Question mark,’ he says.

  ‘That’s right,’ Pearl agrees. ‘Question mark. That’s all I really am – questions that have been bouncing around in your head for some time – questions that you still haven’t found an answer to.’

  ‘An’ one of them is the question about the dress?’

  ‘Naturally, it is. Remember, I’m no more than a schoolgirl. But not just any schoolgirl, Charlie – I’m one who works hard, obeys her teachers, and hopes to go to Oxford. So why would I even want a dress like that?’

  ‘Somebody suggested to me, at the scene of the … of the …’

  ‘Of the crime? Say it, Charlie. At the scene of the crime! Where my body lay – my throat savagely slashed through, my life’s blood staining the uneven ground? Say it – it certainly can’t hurt me now!’

  ‘Somebody suggested, at the scene of the crime, that the reason you were wearin’ the dress was probably because you were on the game.’

  ‘Yes, people can be just horrid about you, can’t they – especially when you’re dead and you can’t defend yourself. But you don’t believe I was on the game, do you, Charlie?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘So why did I need the dress?’

  ‘You needed it as a disguise. Because you wanted to pretend to be something that you weren’t.’

  ‘Very good, Charlie! But that really raises more questions than it answers, doesn’t it? And the biggest one of all is, why would I want to pretend to be something I wasn’t?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Woodend screams. ‘I just don’t bloody know!’

  ‘You shouldn’t let yourself get upset when you’re not feeling well,’ Pearl says, in a kindly manner. ‘Let’s try something a little easier, shall we?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Do you think my mother loved me?’

  ‘I’m sure she did. She had photographs of you all over the sideboard. An’ you should have seen the look of anguish that came to her face when I showed her the picture they’d taken of you at the morgue.’

  ‘I’m sure it must have been heartbreaking. But then – almost immediately – she changed, didn’t she? She said she didn’t recognize the girl in the picture at all. She insisted that whoever it was, it definitely wasn’t me. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what could have made her act in such an unmotherly way?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie, you can find an answer if you really put your mind to it,’ Pearl says – and now there is a hint of impatience in her voice.

  ‘Fear!’ Woodend croaks. ‘She was frightened.’

  ‘But who was she frightened for? For me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not for me?’

  ‘Because you were already dead.’

  ‘Then it could only have been fear for …?’

  ‘For herself!’

  ‘I knew you’d get there in the end,’ Pearl tells him. ‘But why was my mother afraid?’

  ‘Because … because she thought she might be the next one to die.’

  ‘Obviously. But again, why did she think she might be next?’

  ‘Because the killer was punishin’ her for somethin’ she’d done to him?’

  Pearl clicks her tongue disapprovingly.

  ‘You disappoint me, Charlie,’ she says. ‘The words you�
��ve just used might have come out of your mouth, but it wasn’t you speaking them. It’s that idiot DCI Bentley I seem to be having a conversation with now.’

  ‘I know,’ Woodend admits. ‘And I’m very sorry.’

  ‘So let’s take a couple of steps backwards, and see if we can make more sense of it,’ Pearl suggests. ‘If I’d been murdered to punish my mother, she wouldn’t have been afraid that she’d be killed herself, would she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the point of the punishment would be to let her go on livin’, knowin’ that she’d been at least partly responsible for your death.’

  ‘Exactly. And if she was the one who the killer wanted dead, why not just kill her, and leave poor innocent little Pearl out of it?’

  ‘Are you sayin’ that if she had been killed …’

  ‘Or has been killed, Charlie, because you don’t know, do you, whether she’s still alive or not?’

  ‘… or has been killed, it’s for an entirely different reason to the one that led to your death?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I’m not saying anything, Charlie,’ Pearl replies. ‘How can I, when we’ve already established that I’m not really here?’

  He could hear two voices. They sounded as if they were coming through a wad of cotton wool, but they were still clear enough for him to be able to tell that one of them was a woman’s voice, and the other a man’s.

  ‘He’s burnin’ up, Doctor,’ the woman said, worriedly.

  ‘It’s only to be expected, and it’s all to the good,’ the man replied. ‘This is a very nasty case of the flu your husband has come down with, and the best thing for him is just to lie there and sweat it all out.’

  ‘But I feel so helpless!’ said the woman – who Woodend had now identified as Joan. ‘Isn’t there anything I can do to make it easier for him?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ the doctor assured her. ‘But there’s absolutely no need for you to worry about him. All he needs is complete rest for a couple of days, and he should be right as rain.’

  When Woodend opened his eyes, the light streaming in though the window made them prickle. But that didn’t matter, he told himself. The important thing was that it was morning, and he should already be at work.

  ‘Where’s Pearl?’ he asked.

  ‘Pearl?’ the doctor repeated. ‘Is she your daughter?’

  ‘No, she’s … she’s …’ Woodend said, and then discovered that he wasn’t entirely sure who she was at the moment. ‘She was … she was here,’ he concluded lamely.

  ‘Well, I can assure you that she’s certainly not here now, and if I were you, I’d forget all about this Pearl of yours for a while,’ the doctor said. Then he turned to Joan, and mouthed, ‘Delirious.’

  The man was a complete idiot, Woodend thought woozily.

  ‘I have to get up,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go to the Yard.’

  ‘You’re stayin’ right there in bed, Charlie,’ Joan said, placed a restraining hand on his chest.

  As if that could stop him, Woodend thought. Joan was no lightweight, but the idea that she could keep a man of his size down when there was a job to done was plainly ludicrous.

  And then, to his amazement, he found that she could – that he simply didn’t have the strength to resist her.

  ‘Go to sleep now, Charlie,’ Joan said softly. ‘You need to go to sleep.’

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ Woodend told her. ‘Not sleepy at all.’

  But, without even realizing it, he was already beginning to doze off.

  Eighteen

  The overnight rain had frozen into a wafer-thin sheet of ice, turning the Thursday-morning Embankment into one of nature’s booby traps. Most of the people on their way to work treated this temporary hazard with proper respect, abandoning their usual broad strides in favour of a cautious shuffle, but the big man in the heavy overcoat did not seem aware that there was any danger at all – hardly seemed aware, in fact, that he was even on the Embankment.

  ‘Three days!’ Woodend kept repeating to himself, as he approached Scotland Yard. ‘I’ve wasted three days. In bed!’

  His woollen scarf – which Joan had insisted on wrapping tightly around his neck before she allowed him out – had begun to itch almost from the moment he left the flat, but he had been so preoccupied that he had not even thought to loosen it.

  ‘Three days. Three whole bloody days!’

  It was possible that Victoria Jones had died sometime in those three days, though if she had, he still had no idea why she should have done.

  ‘Are you sayin’ that if she has been killed, it’s for an entirely different reason to the one that led to your death?’ he’d asked the dead Pearl, in his delirium.

  And the dead Pearl had not, of course, provided any answer.

  Three days!

  Whatever clues there were to Pearl’s murder – if there were any at all – would have grown stale in three days. Or worse, might have disappeared completely.

  It wasn’t fair to either the dead girl or her mother that he should have been struck down by the flu bug – but then, when had life ever been fair?

  Two days had been plenty of time to make a full recovery, he told himself, as he climbed the stairs to his office – after two days he should have ignored the doctor’s advice and got back into harness.

  But by the time he reached the landing his lungs were on fire, and there was at least a part of him which acknowledged that if he had got up the day before, he’d have been back in his sick bed by now.

  The office was empty, save for DC Cotteral, who had abandoned his interest in paper-clip sculpture, and now he was conducting an experiment in abstract art which involved releasing drops of ink from his fountain pen at various heights, and then studying the pattern they made on his blotting paper.

  ‘Good to see you back on your feet again, Sarge,’ he said cheerily. Then, with a broad wink, he added, ‘Course, we don’t really know why you were off your feet in the first place, now do we?’

  ‘I had the flu,’ Woodend said.

  ‘So you say. But it wouldn’t surprise me if, instead of having the flu, you’d been hammering the bedsprings with some floozy for the last three days.’

  How long had Cotteral been working on that particular line, Woodend wondered. Ever since Joan had phoned in to say that he was sick?

  ‘Get it, Sarge?’ Cotteral asked. ‘Flu and floozy?’

  ‘I get it,’ Woodend said.

  He should have expected no better, he told himself. Cotteral had to fill his time with something, and since catching murderers was unthinkable, why not fill it by thinking up weak jokes?

  ‘Where’s the guv’nor?’ he asked.

  ‘Now there you’ve got me,’ Cotteral admitted. ‘I don’t actually know where he is at the moment. But I do know that he said he’d be in later in the morning.’

  ‘An’ how’s the case goin’?’

  ‘The case?’ Cotteral repeated, as if he had no idea what the sergeant was talking about. ‘Oh, you mean the little darkie’s murder?’ he asked, as enlightenment dawned.

  Woodend wondered what kind of disciplinary sanction would be imposed on him if he spattered DC Cotteral’s idiot face all over the wall. By rights, he thought, he should be given a medal for it.

  ‘Yes, I mean the little darkie’s murder,’ he said.

  ‘There’s been no progress at all, really,’ Cotteral said lazily. ‘We’re still waiting for the big break.’

  ‘How about the mother? Victoria Jones? Have you got any leads on where she might be?’

  ‘Well, yes, we have, as a matter of fact,’ Cotteral said, with a sudden seriousness. ‘We think that she’s hiding in a coal cellar somewhere, especially after dark.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  A grin started to form at the corners of Cotteral’s mouth. ‘Because we can’t find her, Sarge.’

  ‘You’re not makin’ any sense,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘Don
’t you know the old joke?’

  ‘What old joke?

  ‘Question: what’s the hardest thing in the world to find?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Cotteral laughed. ‘Answer: a nigger, in a coal cellar, at midnight.’

  ‘You make me puke,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s funny, Sarge?’ Cotteral asked, half-surprised, half-offended.

  ‘No, I bloody don’t!’

  ‘But I thought you were one of us now.’

  It was the phone, ringing on his desk, which prevented Woodend telling Cotteral that since he’d never had any particular ambition to become an idle, bigoted toe-rag, the chances that he would ever become one of them were very slim.

  He picked up the phone. ‘DS Woodend.’

  ‘You knew what was going to happen, didn’t you, you bastard?’ demanded the man at the other end of the line. ‘You knew you were making me walk across an unmarked minefield – and you didn’t bloody care!’

  The voice sounded so cracked – so utterly pathetic – that it took Woodend several seconds to identify it. And even when he did come up with a name, it was such an improbable one that he almost sure he’d made a mistake.

  ‘Tom?’ he asked tentatively. ‘Tom Townshend? Is that you?’

  ‘Why do you even need to ask who it is? Or have you sent so many poor sods out on suicide missions that you’ve begun to lose count of them?’

  ‘I really have no idea what you’re on about, Tom,’ Woodend protested. ‘Can we meet up somewhere an’ talk about it?’

  ‘If it was left up to me, the next time we met would be at your funeral,’ Townshend said bitterly. ‘And the only reason I’d put in an appearance there would be so I could dance on your grave.’

  ‘Listen, Tom—’ Woodend began.

  ‘But it hasn’t been left up to me, has it?’ Townshend interrupted. ‘I’ve been told we’ve got to have a meeting. This morning!’

  ‘Told? Who told you?’

  ‘I’ll see you at the northern end of the Broad Walk in Green Park, in an hour from now.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can just drop everything here and—’

  ‘Be there!’

  ‘I have to know what’s happened, Tom,’ Woodend said worriedly. ‘You need to explain …’